Dr. Tariq Rahman

More Out of the Wilderness

I have been functioning more or less like a hermit in the academic world of Pakistan. I mostly live in libraries and archives doing my research. As such, I have always assumed that I am ‘a voice in the wilderness’. It therefore came as a surprise to me that my article of that title (Dawn, Education page: 26 May 2002) was responded to by so many people. Even more surprising was the fact that people not only agreed with my criticism of the report of the Task Force on Higher Education but went ahead to propose even more radical changes.

Let me now add that, upto now, nobody has ‘officially’---so to speak---ever consulted me on any aspect of higher education. People have met me informally but that is all. This is fine with me as my articles say whatever I have to say and all ‘official’ meetings will only be a waste of time. However, as higher education is a subject about which I am concerned, let me express some fears as to what is happening to the idea of the university in Pakistan.

I still adhere to the admittedly old fashioned idea that a university is a place for learning in the widest sense of the world. It is correctly translated in Persian as ‘Danish Gah’---the House of Wisdom! It does have other roles too but they should not be allowed to dominate, and indeed replace, the primary aim of imparting wide learning to students. This wide learning is not the narrow mastery of certain skills or a narrow subject. This means that any place imparting skills in information technology, business administration, computer science, electronics, engineering and medicine alone really does not qualify to be called a university. To qualify for the name of a ‘university’, a place should have most of the major areas known to humanity. Subjects like history, economics, politics, philosophy, linguistics, literature, religion, sociology, anthropology and archaeology must be taught by a university. Indeed, if universities do not teach them who will? They will die and with them the whole concept of human knowledge as a product of human curiosity will also die.

Moreover, not only should the natural sciences, social sciences and arts be part of the university, they should also be taught to all students. I do not mean that compulsory courses in them should be imposed upon students. That is always counter-productive. Instead, the students should be exposed to lectures, seminars and discussions on all subjects. I am sure subjects like international relation, economic policy, women rights, educational policy, language problems etc are so interesting for intelligent students that they will come to these events voluntarily. Famous scholars can be invited to speak to students. Indeed, the science departments can make this a regular feature and the social sciences, in turn, could invite scientists. Brief, non-credit, courses too can be made compulsory for students in fields other than their own. These steps will create academically and intellectually well rounded students. Such students would have heard the names of the greatest achievers in intellectual fields after leaving the university. They will not be like educated barbarians who think of a university as a place to get a degree in order to get a job---people who enter and leave the so-called ‘portals of learning’ without knowing the name of Ibn-e-Khaldun or Einstein or Ghalib!

Besides providing general knowledge, the social sciences and arts are necessary, as are the basic sciences, to produce an educated person. Knowledge has to be used. To use it one must understand how it will affect human beings? Exactly who will be harmed and benefited by it? Exactly what other, unknown, changes it might produce? How moral will it be? These questions are not answered by studying narrow subjects in isolation. For instance, Paul Kennedy warns us in his book Preparing for the Twenty-First Century (1993) how globalization produces losers as well as winners. Those who rushed to use the knowledge created by great physicists like Einstein and Niels Bohr to create nuclear weapons did not know enough of history, psychology and politics to understand that the world will become an unsafe place for ever. In short, while narrow knowledge and skills give power without sobriety and wisdom; wide knowledge, especially of the social sciences, gives the possibility of wisdom.

Our major problem is that those who possess power, such as the military top brass, bureaucrats and sometimes politicians, have not been through the process of a liberal university education. Even if they have been to universities they have not come across a wide diversity of subjects nor the best minds of the age as I have been recommending. As such they emerge with their prejudices intact. They take momentous decisions but without any understanding of their bad effects. They sow the dragons’ teeth---and we know what one reaps when one does that!

That is one reason why I would recommend that, while higher education is being restructured, the name of ‘university’ should be reserved only for an institution offering all subjects and not one or two capital-generating ones. This condition should be followed by both public and private institutions, of course. All the one or two subject institutions should be called colleges or institutes or something other than a university. At one time engineering and medical faculties, or colleges, were part of a university. This is how it should be again. The I.T places can become I.T departments; the MBA places can become part of the Faculty of Economic Sciences and so on. This will not harm the new subjects. It will take away the illusion, the false assumption, that one can create a university which does not cater for the gratification of human curiosity in general---the essence of what created all knowledge in the first place.

I also feel that the profit motive is killing the essence of the liberal, humanist conception of the university I am talking about. In the West funding by the industry and the military are threatening to do away with philosophy, religion, arts and literature. This will mean that, apart from a few Chomskys and Edward Saids, universities will stop producing schoalrs who will be critical of Western policies of control over the world’s resources and way of life. In Pakistan the deluje of private universities is already doing the same. Our public universities were threatened with lack of funds, government control and incompetent faculty. I used to say that we need to make the universities autonomous and they should pay so well as to attract the best brains. Now the private universities are not government controlled. They also pay better than the public universities. But still we have almost no outstanding scholarship. Indeed, from the public universities there are a few voices but from the private universities, except in some technical fields, almost none. Why? Firstly, because the private universities concentrate on a few capital-generating subjects. Secondly, they are mostly in the business of teaching rather than research. Thirdly, they are highly regimented and the faculty is afraid of being thrown out of their job if they turn to critical, let alone radical, analysis.

Another change which is taking place right before our eyes is the increasing ghettoization of the public university. The state is spending money on technology, especially I.T, and thus implying that all other fields of knowledge are useless. Good students used to go for job-procuring subjects anyway but the route generally lay through the university. Now it does not. The rich go to the expensive private places. The middle class lives on grass, so to speak, to send sons (not daughters for the most part) to a little less expensive places. The poor (and often girls) enter the public university with a sense of despair. We did have elitist English-medium schools which had created a caste system at the school level. At the university level the classes get together at last. Now the classes will always be apart. The caste system will operate throughout the educational system. How this will affect class relations in Pakistan is something nobody has answerd. That it is unjust is obvious but the fact that it will make being an academic in a public university something of a shame is not being noticed. The stigma of being employed in a low-paying place teaching subjects which have no value is not calculated to create great ideas of our own. We already have few historians or economists or sociologists; we have no philosophers; the few scholars on Islam we have are there despite the system not because of it. We complain of Indian academics dominating the world scholarly community from South Asia. We lament about the fact that Western names---Toynbee, Russell, Fukuyama, Huntington---dominate the world of ideas but our policy of downgrading universities which can create knowledge in these subjects is now becoming even more lethal for our scholars.

Another change which stares us in the face is the final victory of the administration and the non-academics over the academics. Since our public universities were created by colonial administrators, the academics were weak as far as real policy-making and governance was concerned. Sometimes vice chancellors were judges and bureaucrats. However, for the most part academics were made vice chancellors. Now, the public universities are slowly going into the hands of military officers, bureaucrats and other non-academic appointees. In the private sector too the most powerful appointments do not go to academics. The armed forces have universities of their own which run very much like hierarchical forces schools i.e without academics making decisions through committees and boards. In short the idea is growing that the faculty are providers of services and not the wielders of power and controllers of policy in universities. The new administrators of universities feel that academics can be hired and fired by them and that the top bosses of universities need not be members of the faculty at all. This takes away the power of the faculty and is most insulting for those academics who still have some self-respect left.

It may already be too late. However, if academics do not want to be sidelined altogether; if the name of the ‘university’ is not to be made cheap and common; if our degrees are not to become the laughing stock of the world; if our middle and upper-middle class does not want to be relieved of exorbitant amounts of money in the name of the education of their children; if the public university is not to become a ghetto like the Urdu-medium government school---then it is time to act! Let our voices not be only voices in the wilderness.

Dr. Tariq Rahman